|
 |
A Linguistic Odyssey | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6144 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 57 of 265 08 October 2009 at 1:40pm | IP Logged | ||
Yes, I definitely agree. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| psychicist Bilingual Octoglot Newbie Netherlands Joined 5570 days ago 9 posts - 9 votes Speaks: Dutch*, Hindi*, French, English, German, Spanish, Latin, Ancient Greek Studies: Greek, Persian, Sanskrit | Message 58 of 265 08 October 2009 at 2:47pm | IP Logged | ||
|
Really inspiring to see you taking on so many languages, it kind of reminds me of myself at that age but you're taking it multiple steps further :). As for people misrepresenting their skills on this forum, I don't think I would ever call myself being natively fluent in anything other than my native languages. On my profile I only have listed advanced fluency for those languages I have studied in high school or the one I have been studying on my own for many years.
As for Greek, I have a better grasp of the Ancient language than the modern one, mostly because of a lack of vocabulary. But it was even during high school that my interest in the modern language was growing and these days I'm trying to find time to immerse myself into the language again. If you care to write more in Greek, that should certainly help. Although at this point I'm a little afraid to write a longer passage in the modern language for a lack of vocabulary, but I hope to know a lot more words by the end of the year. If you don't mind me making a small comment on your Greek dating back to last month, I would like to ask if what you wrote on the last line is correct. You wrote "Με αυτές οι λέξεις, θα σας πω καληνύχτα.", shouldn't that be "Με αυτές τις λέξεις, θα σας πω καληνύχτα."? I look forward to reading more about your fascinating journey on your log. Edited by psychicist on 08 October 2009 at 2:49pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6144 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 59 of 265 08 October 2009 at 2:52pm | IP Logged | ||
Thanks for stopping by, psychicist. And yes, what you said is correct, because you use the accusative (τις) with με. Thanks for pointing that out to me! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6144 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 60 of 265 09 October 2009 at 8:06pm | IP Logged | ||
|
Thursday: Deutsch
Goals: 1) 1 lesson of Ultimate German, 2) 1 Livemocha German lesson Achieved: 1) yes, 2) yes Hallo! Heute habe ich vielen Deutsch studiert. (My friend who speaks German just read over that very simple sentence to validate its correctness.) So, I am obviously late in writing this entry and it is now Friday, when I should be studying Greek. But I didn't have time (too busy making verb charts for the several Romance languages for no apparent reason) last night and I didn't have time this morning either. Currently, I am sitting in the school library during what should have been my Spanish class. However, today is a special day at my school: All Cultures Day. This means that it's a huge food festival in the cafeteria that you get to go to when you have a language class, free period, or lunch. I happen to have French, Spanish, and lunch all in a row, so I have two and a half hours of the madness. I could not take any more and my stomach was hurting (from all the ice cream) therefore I came here and decided to write my journal entry. Hooray. I did my German lesson yesterday, which consisted of many long words about trade fairs and business. Yay. And I learned about subordinate clauses and conjunctions, which I already sorta knew. And the masculine "n-nouns." Yep. Then, late at night I also went through my German Livemocha lesson and made the vocabulary list. Then, this morning did my vocabulary for that list I made last night. Hooray. And then I typed up my vocabulary list for my LGWT Greek lesson too, which I'll do later when I get home. Then, I had All Cultures Day and stuffed myself silly with ice cream, soda, and quesadillas. There's lots more, but that's all I got... Sad. So now I'm in the library and luckily they don't have this site blocked on their server. :) Well, maybe I should do my math homework or some AP World History reading now. Byez! --Philip Edited by ellasevia on 11 October 2009 at 5:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5867 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 61 of 265 10 October 2009 at 4:42am | IP Logged | ||
|
How do you find the LiveMocha lessons? I think it's alright for a language like Portuguese, where a lot of the structures are already familiar to me. But for a language like Russian--which I think is the exact same course as the Portuguese one, and probably every other one, only translated into Russian--it really doesn't do a good job explaining anything. Also, some of the exercises can be frustrating. For example, deciding if the answer is "Uma mulher." or "uma mulher". I've enjoyed going through the Portuguese course (despite how frustrating the exercises are), but I don't feel like it's doing much for my Russian. How do you use it?
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6144 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 62 of 265 10 October 2009 at 5:44am | IP Logged | ||
I go through the lessons, combing for new vocabulary and noticing grammatical structures and manners of expressing things. If there is something I do not understand, I look it up elsewhere on the Internet or in books for explanation. I compile the lists of vocabulary in BYKI and edit the cards to fit my needs. Using German as an example, I will have a German noun with its definite article in the word section (ex. der Mann) and its plural form in the hints section (die Männer). I also make note if a verb is separable by placing an asterisk between the separable prefix and the stem in the hints section (ab*fahren). The "review" exercise doesn't really do anything for me, and I only do it so that the lessons appear complete. But it depends on the language. For Swedish, I have the indefinite article and the noun in the word area (ett rum) and in the hints section, I include the noun class and/or irregular plural form, plus any notes I may have, such as the noun already being plural. For verbs, I have the infinitive in the word area and the conjugation type any any irregular formations (present, past, past participle) in the hints section. But that's how I do it from any resource, not just Livemocha. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| KiwiKiwi Tetraglot Groupie Belgium Joined 5698 days ago 50 posts - 50 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, German, French Studies: Italian, Russian | Message 63 of 265 12 October 2009 at 2:03pm | IP Logged | ||
|
Hi Ellasevia,
Good luck with all your languages, great to see someone with passion! Just one little thing: your German sentence has to be, in my opion: "Hallo! Heute habe ich viel Deutsch studiert." I would rather use (instead of "viel"): "sehr lange" or "sehr gut". That sounds more native German to me, but that is my opinion. (Wooo a lot of words for one little thing). Edited by KiwiKiwi on 12 October 2009 at 2:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6144 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 64 of 265 18 October 2009 at 4:50pm | IP Logged | ||
|
Wow, I've been lazy and haven't posted in a while. I haven't said what I have done since...um, Friday the 9th of October (but talking about what I did on the 8th). Then my weekend was really busy and I felt pretty sick on Friday. I kept postponing it. I didn't do it Monday morning, like I intended and then Tuesday and Wednesday I was sick again and then Thursday was incredibly busy and I was trying to catch up on studying on Friday. Yesterday I intended to do it, but was doing other things. So, now that I'm done with excuses, what have I done?
I've decided to organize this list into all the activities I have done for each language since October 8/9 instead of having a separate part for each day. So, here it goes... PORTUGUESE - 1 lesson of Ultimate Portuguese - Re-did a Livemocha review lesson for accuracy* - Tutored some Brazilians on LM and wrote them comments in Portuguese *Because when I did it this summer I was in Greece with terrible Internet access and eventually just gave up on waiting an hour for each card to load and took a zero on the exercise. FRENCH - 1 lesson of Ultimate French - Went to French class 4 out of 5 days this week SWEDISH - Swedish book arrived on Tuesday!!! - 3 Livemocha lessons - Reviewed lesson 1 vocabulary in Swedish: An Elementary Grammar-Reader (from now on abbreviated SEGL) - Did all of lesson 2 - Learned some extra stuff on my own (e.g., more about adjectives) - Typed up opening texts for the first 2 lessons of SEGL and translated them into English - Typed up the "translate into Swedish" texts for the first 2 lessons of SEGL and translated them into Swedish - Decided to move my goal of basic fluency for Swedish to 8 months rather than 6 months, so the new date is May 29th GERMAN - 2 lessons Ultimate German (yay!) - Finished activities in a part-done LM lesson - Did an entire LM lesson - Learned 73 strong/mixed verbs and their irregular past participles (yay, what a feat) - Reviewed some vocabulary GREEK - 2 lessons of LGWT - 1 list of Odysseas vocabulary - 2 LM (did I mention that LM = LiveMocha?) lessons JAPANESE - Reviewed previous week's vocabulary (Unit 5) - Read all of Unit 5 and learned all about those misbehaving Japanese adjectives - 'Learned' 14 new kanji - Reviewed kanji most days this week - Started reading Unit 6 in TY Japanese and got scared and stopped because adjectives can apparently conjugate like verbs and be in the past tense in Japanese ITALIAN - 1 LM lesson - 1 lesson of STG: Italian - Got a friend to start learning Italian - Listened to a bunch of Michel Thomas (while biking, doing medieval artwork...) - New book arrived on Tuesday: Easy Italian Reader - Read the first two or three lessons of that and did the exercises Yep... So that's what I have done up through last night, October 17th. It should be noted that I have not yet studied any Japanese this week besides reviewing earlier kanji and beginning to read Unit 6. Nor have I yet studied Italian other than listening to MT and reading a bit of my new Italian book. EDIT: I intend to go back to posting each night again starting tonight. Also, I think I shall move Japanese to Sunday and Italian to Saturday. Edited by ellasevia on 18 October 2009 at 5:12pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
